Growing up in Southern Arizona, the bobcat was a frequent caller to the backyards in my neighborhood. The stubby-tailed felids tended to regard human residences not as obstructions, so much as cultivated annexes to their otherwise undomesticated habitat.

When hunting, the local bobcats would slink from house-to-house via an intricate network of desert washes. The washes themselves were thick and wild with cactus and mesquite trees, and the bobcats would scour them for rabbits, rats, birds, and insects. But their prowls were always punctuated by stopovers in residential yards and garden plots, where they would search for, and inevitably find, tamer fare. (In S. AZ, locals like to say that there are two types of domestic cats: indoor cats and dead cats. The same is often said of smaller dogs.)

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All this is to say that the bobcat is a remarkably adaptable, resilient creature, which is probably why its 12 recognized subspecies have persisted — thrived, even — so successfully throughout North America, even in the face of ever-expanding human populations. It probably also doesn't hurt that they are intimidating as hell when they're cornered — a fact that the video up top should make abundantly clear.

It's funny — even when you have a trapped bobcat "right where you want him," you really don't.